Xbox Romance II: Truth
by Cmdr. Gen. Marasco
Summary: The beginning of the second Xbox Romance trilogy. Picks up a month or so after the couple's first meeting. Colin hasn't seen Miranda in a week, but their reunion and Firefight match ends in some problems caused by Miranda's family...


Xbox Romance II: Truth

"You ready for this?" Miranda asked from my side. I nodded, slowly, and swallowed. My mouth was dry. Quickly, I took a swig of Mountain Dew Code Red from the bottle next to me.

"When you are." I replied. Miranda smiled and reached down to grab my second controller from the top of my Xbox, brushing her hand along my leg intentionally as she did so. I smiled and patted the top of her hand as she pulled it away. I didn't stop smiling even after Miranda pulled away completely and started syncing her controller up with my 360. I was, for the first time in a long while, actually happy.

Today was the first time in almost three weeks that I had seen Miranda. After that fateful first meeting (almost a month ago, I realized, looking at the calendar by my TV), we tried to hang out with each other as much as possible. We managed to do hang out pretty often, every couple of days or so, a schedule helped by Miranda's rather bizarre family life, one that meant that her vanishing for hours (even, on one unforgettable occasion involving her showing up at my door, unannounced and soaked to the bone from Washington's infamous spring rains, _days_), and reappearing at my house (she _always_ came over to my place, never the other way around) wasn't considered unusual or worrying to her parents. Sometimes, I wondered why her family was like this, but not much. I was happy enough to have her over.

Most of the time we spent together was divided about evenly between playing Halo (3, mainly, but also some early Reach via Miranda's copy, which was _amazing_), watching machinima, and making out. Well, I guess it was more of the first and the last of those two, but still. Some times we did two at the same time (Halo and kissing is actually a lot better than it sounds).

Simply put, it was the greatest time in my life...so far, at least.

Then, two weeks ago, the Grunt corpse hit the Grav Lift.

It started when Miranda called a day before we were supposed to meet again to cancel, stating "family stuff" as the reason. I simply shrugged (despite the fact I was holding the phone at the time and she couldn't see me) and said no hard feelings. I figured we'd be on our schedule again in a couple days.

Then she went silent. No phone call, instant message, not even an email. I didn't hear from her for almost a week; an unheard of amount of time for us. My mom told me not to worry. There was more to life than Halo, she said. Miranda was probably just doing something with her family.

I didn't really say anything to that, just nodded my head like some Flood form under the control of the Gravemind. Actually, a Flood host is actually a pretty good simile for how I felt. My body certainly felt like something had crawled inside and excavated my organs.

And then, yesterday, I finally heard from Miranda again. I was playing the campaign of Reach (which I had only just recently acquired, having sadly missed the midnight release), felling Grunts with my DMR's 7.62mm rounds, when the phone rang. To say I sprinted for it would be inaccurate; I probably rivaled Kelly in sheer speed (and that's saying something, considering she's a Spartan-II).

The moment I picked up the phone, Miranda started babbling apologies, almost to fast for me to hear. It seemed she felt the same way about not being able to hang out as I did. Probably a little worse, actually; a minute or so into the call, she simply broke down into sobs (something I'd _never_ heard or seen her do, not even when she saw the deaths of Noble Team for the first time, though her eyes did tear up when Jorge fell).

The only thing I could think of to say was "Come on over." To which Miranda replied she would.

So we both hung up, and I sat down in the living room to wait. I knew Miranda would come. My mom had made it _very_ clear that Miranda was "always welcome, for whatever reason", though hell if I knew _why_.

Not that I was complaining, of course.

And so I waited for my Miranda to arrive. I have to say, the fifteen minutes it took her to get over to my house (she'd recently acquired a _motor scooter_, of all things) were some of the worst in my life. I don't know what dying feels like, but I bet its something like the horrid, sucking feeling that filled my chest during the wait, making it hard to breath and sending my heart rate skyrocketing.

And then the knock at the door.

I'm not afraid to say this; I can now officially say I know what Spartan Time feels like. The moment I heard that, my heart went from almost painfully fast to a dead stop for what felt like a good five seconds.

Which is probably why I, after simultaneously standing up, spinning around, and calling out "Come in!" to the closed door, promptly had my legs go weak, making me stumble and almost fall face-first into Miranda's cleavage the moment she stepping into the house. Not that would have been a _bad_ thing from my point of view, but it still wasn't fun.

Thankfully, Miranda had the reflexes of an avid gamer, and she managed to catch me before I face-planted her tits, both to my relief and simultaneous disappointment.

Then followed the teen-romance standard; the stretched seconds of silent eye gazing and three minutes of glorious, uninterrupted making out (during which Miranda actually put her hand up the back of my shirt, which was surprising but not unwelcome).

After broke apart (something I was actually glad to do, considering the burning in my lungs from lack of air), we went back to staring at each other.

She was as beautiful as I remembered. If anything, she'd become hotter than when I'd last saw her (a fact helped by the black T-shirt with Emile's helmet on it that she wore, which ironically was actually _my_ shirt, which I won at the Emerald City Comic Convention back in March). But being as close to her face as I was, it was hard to miss that she looked subtly different; her face looked tired, and I could see there were dark circles under her eyes. Her eyes themselves had a hard edge to them that wasn't there before. In the back of my mind, I wondered what the hell had caused her to change.

Miranda must have noticed the confusion in my eyes because the first thing out of her mouth when she caught her breath was "questions later, Halo now."

That worked fine for me.

"Hey, Colin." Miranda's voice shattered my thoughts like a sniper round going through glass. "It's on. What're you up for playing?"

I glanced up. Sure enough, the blackness of my TV's screen had been replaced by the menu screen of Halo Reach. I blinked the confusion away and swallowed some more Mountain Dew.

"I'm not really sure." I replied, mind still slow from the shock of actually seeing Miranda again. The fact that I was so close to her to notice that my shirt was a size and a half too small for her wasn't helping any. I looked away, towards the screen, trying to get my head back into focus. As I did, I noticed something in the upper right corner of my screen. Under the list of my friends who were online, one GamerTag stood out;

Straif

"Hey, Chris is on!" I said, pointing. Miranda glanced up, following my finger.

"Well what do you know," She said, more to herself than to me. "He finally got Live." She glanced over at me again.

"You got a mic? I want to actually talk to this guy."

I smiled, and reached into the small bag I had attached to the chair for just this reason. I drew out my pair of Xbox Live headsets, one of which I tossed to Miranda. We both plugged them into our controllers, and I quickly sent a party invite to Chris. He responded almost instantly.

"Colin, that you?" He asked. Unlike most of the people I talked to via Live, Chris's voice came through relatively static-free; he was only a couple miles north from us, in the area of Seattle surrounding the Woodland Park Zoo. I'd first met him during a multi-school science project set up by the Seattle Aquarium, and then again at the Comic Con (quite by accident), and we'd bonded over our shared interest in Halo. Miranda hadn't met him though, only communicated via email. Probably why she was so interested in talking to him.

"Solid copy," I replied. "What's your sitrep?"

"Chilling, mainly. Kicking some Covenant ass. Trying to unlock the EVA/C armor permutation. Nothing much. How bout you?"

"Same." I grinned again, my spirits lifted by my friend's virtual presence. An idea entered my head. Calmly, I added "Oh, Miranda's back."

"Hi." Miranda said chirpily. "Nice to finally hear your voice."

Chris went silent. For a moment, I thought his microphone had broken. Then he returned in full force.

"TEN-SHUN!" He howled over the mic, loud enough to make me cringe. "Commander ON DECK!"

Miranda looked at me for a moment, blinked, and then promptly fell flat onto her face laughing. I couldn't help but join in. In seconds, we were booth on the ground.

"Commander..." Miranda gasped out, slamming her fist on the ground. "That's a good one."

"Yeah." I barely managed to get my laughter under control. I took a couple deep breaths and calmed down. Miranda did the same, and we returned to our seats.

"Okay, wow, sorry." Miranda gasped out, a smile still on her lips. "What the hell was that?"

"Just something I've been wanting to do for a good long while now." Chris said. I could almost hear the shrug in his voice. "Sounds like you guys thought it was funny."

"We did," I added, felling my own face ache from smiling. "Hell if I know why..."

"Randomness is funny." Said Miranda. I simply grunted in response. I wasn't in a mood to argue.

"Hey, since your on and all, you guys wanna do some Firefight?" Chris asked, apparently forgetting the fact that he'd just dropped us into ROFL mode. "I'm trying to unlock a couple more commendations."

I glanced at Miranda. She seemed interested at the prospect.

"Sure." I said. "Why the hell not? Haven't don FF in a while."

"Awesome." A slapping sound came through my headset; something I recognized as Chris punching his fist into his palm. He paused. "Uh, well, your party leader, so..."

"Right, sorry." Quickly, I moved our party into the Firefight playlist. We got lucky; the first possibly game that came up was a personal favorite of mine; standard Firefight on Outpost.

"Fucking barking spiders yes!" Chris shouted, drawing a look of confusion from Miranda. Apparently, he enjoyed this map as well. "Covie roadkill time!"

"Fucking barking spiders?" Miranda mouthed to me. I shrugged.

"It's a steampunk reference, I think." I replied.

"Oh..."

I thought of adding more, but the beeping of the countdown started. The screen turned black, and, after a final quick glance over at Miranda, I tuned out everything except it.

The loadout screen came up. I scanned through it, trying to decide what to run with. Jetpack, Sprint, or Drop Shield...

"I got shield." Chris called out, making my decision that much easier.

"Cool. I'll take Jetpack." Miranda added.

"I...guess I'll go with Sprint then." I said slowly.

"DMR's always good on this map." Chris commented.

"True."

All three of us fell silent as the spawn timer counted down. It hit zero, and we spawned.

Instantly, we split. Chris headed for the nearest Ordinance Drop, acquiring the Target Locater. Miranda headed for the other, covering the distance quickly with bursts from her Jetpack. I simply activated my Sprint and hurried to the closest ammo cabinet, instantly filling both of my weapons to their fullest.

"I'm green!" I called out. "How about you guys?"

"Ready to rock, five-by-five boss!" Chris called out. "Tango Lima's ready to bring the rain at your command."

"I'm good to go," Miranda added. "Got the Sniper Rifle. Ready to pop some heads."

"Solid copy." I switched to my Assault Rifle, readying for the expected onrush of Grunts and Jackals. That was always the first Wave of enemies you faced at the beginning of every Round in Firefight. Even as I thought of it, I could hear the arriving Phantoms swooping in on their antigravity engines. I glanced around and quickly spotted them. They were moving to opposite ends of the map, intending to catch us in a pincer movement.

Quickly, I shouted orders to my team.

"Miranda, take that Sniper and get up on the broken AA Gun. Start picking Grunts off with your Pistol, then when the bigger guys show up, feed them some Sniper rounds. Chris, get up on the base's roof and use that turret to give us covering fire. Try to keep it intact so we can use it later."

"Got it, Colin. I'm Oscar Mike." Miranda lit her Jetpack once more and shot skyward, soaring majestically to the top section of the broken Covenant anti-aircraft gun that was on the "left" side of the map (facing towards the burning remains of ONI: Sword Base in the distance).

"I got your back." Chris called out, before hurrying up to the roof of the square building in the center of the map. I saw him pause, throw down a Drop Shield, then mount the turret.

"What's with the DS?" I wondered. I hadn't seen anyone do this strategy before.

"It's something I found by accident. You place the shield far back enough, you can stand on the turret and shoot out. The shield blocks anything incoming, and you don't have to worry about your exposed position."

"Nice." I complimented. I filled that idea away for later use.

"Yeah, its awesome-Incoming!" Chris interrupted himself, calling out to us the large group of Covenant infantry that was approaching. He opened up on them with the turret as he finished talking.

I adjusted my vision. Sure enough, the expected group of Grunts and Jackals were approaching, having been dropped by the Phantoms. The Grunts waddled along, Plasma Pistols at the ready. The Jackals hid behind their Point Defense Gauntlets, all except for the Sniper who moved with them, Needle Rifle in his hands.

"That Needle Rifle's mine." Miranda called out from her position atop the gun.

"Allow me to get it for you, my lady." I replied, in a bad British accent. Miranda giggled.

"I got 'em, boss." Chris called out. "I'll draw their attention. You flank and spank."

"Got it." I activated my Sprint again, charging across the scorched earth to the large cluster of rocks opposite the base and AA Guns. The Covenant didn't see me, effectively distracted by Chris's turret fire. Silently, I moved behind them, crouching to increase stealth. In seconds, I was behind the rear Jackal. I snuck up behind it and held down the Right Bumper. The camera switched to a third-person view, giving me a glorious view of my avatar grabbing the Jackal by the shoulder, pulling it close to him, and ramming his combat knife into it's neck. A satisfying Assassination if there ever was one.

"Brutal!" Chris howled, having apparently abandoned his turret when it overheated. He was currently firing on the nearest Grunts with his Pistol, dropping them quickly with accurate shots. "You Rear Admiral-ed the shit out of him!"

Rear Admiral. Chris's pet name for Assassinations, which he had apparently picked up from a person who worked at 343 Industries itself at the Comic Con. I chuckled.

"Yeah, one reason this Reach is better than Black Ops..." I said, more to myself than anyone. Chris laughed in agreement.

"Hey, you going to get that Needle Rifle or not?" Miranda called from the top of the gun. "I'm almost out of ammo here."

"Working on it!" I called back. I moved forward silently, walking over a Plasma Grenade dropped by one of Grunts that Chris had blown away with his turret. I switched from Frags to Plasma, then let it fly. The grenade stuck to the back of one of the shield-carrying Jackals, who had enough time to squawk in horror before it exploded, taking him and most of his buddies out. The rest I finished of with a quick burst from my Assault Rifle. I walked over to the Needle Rifle and swapped out my AR for it, then started "walking" it towards Miranda's position; moving forward and swapping the my AR and the Needle Rifle ever step or so, my forward momentum sending the weapon a couple steps again of me every time. Once I reached the broken gun, I dropped the Needle Rifle.

"All yours!" I called up to Miranda. I didn't wait for her to pick it up. I spun around and Sprinted off, heading for the middle of the map. In the background, I could hear Phantom's approaching again.

"Get ready, here they come!" Chris called out. I grunted in response.

"Bring it on!" Miranda howled. I could hear her equipping the Sniper Rifle. I switched to my DMR, ready to fight.

As it turned out, none of us had to do anything. The two Phantoms did something rare and welcome; they deposited their personnel together, one right behind the other.

Chris took advantage of this.

"Stand clear, I'm going loud!" He yelled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him switch to the Target Locater, then heard the sound of him painting the target area with it. There was a _beep_, and a glowing red holographic ring appeared where the Phantoms were dropping their cargo. A moment of silence followed. Then everything exploded.

At least, that's how it felt. Really, seven high-explosive rounds soared from the sky into the area that Chris had designated. The moment they hit, they detonated, blowing apart everything within the area. Grunts, Jackals and Brutes (apparently the second wave had Brutes leading it instead of Elites) flew in all directions. I even saw a Brute Captain fly straight off the cliff behind us.

"Hell yeah!" Chris shouted. "Crowd-fucking-Control, baby?"

"Huh?" Was all I could say.

"I think he just got the Crowd Control Achievement." Miranda explained, before firing her Sniper at something moving in the rocks. It turned out to be a Brute, which had somehow escaped the rain of explosives Chris had brought down on it.

"Oh yeah. Get a Killionare in Firefight." I grunted and moved on, scanning for any extra enemies that the Locater might have missed. There weren't many, just a single lonely Grunt that I promptly dropped with a DMR headshot.

"That...went quicker than I hoped." Chris admitted. "Well, we still have three waves to go, right?"

"And two other Rounds after that." I agreed.

"Better make that two..." Miranda called out. More Phantoms were dropping in.

"Then let's make it zero." I growled. The moment I said it, I regretted it. It seemed kind of dumb. Oh well. No taking it back. Besides, it didn't seem like Chris or Miranda seemed to have heard.

I activated my Sprint and charged into the fray.

Twenty minutes later, it was over. The Covenant never stood a chance against the combined forces of me, Miranda and Chris. They fell, riddled with bullets, dropped by headshots and blown sky high by the Target Locater. The final fight was extremely epic; a Hunter Kill Team, consisting of Hunters and Elite Generals. It wasn't epic because it was tough fight (it actually lasted barely five minutes), but because Chris killed most of the enemies with a well-placed Target Locater tag on one of the Hunters. I must say, there are few things more satisfying than seeing Hunters fly.

After the Hunters fell, we cleaned up the rest of the group pretty quickly. After the bonus round (or as Miranda likes to call it, "Gruntapalosa"), we were done. Several thousand Credits for all of us, and a rank promotion for Chris and Miranda. So, all in all, we considered it a good match.

When we finished, we went back to the Lobby and chatted for a while. Then Chris had to leave to go do something, so he did. Once he did, Miranda and I got off the Xbox and just talked. We caught each other up on the last week or so (well, she caught me up. There really wasn't much for me to say to her).

When she finished, we fell silent. It seemed we didn't really have much more to talk about. Well, there was _one_ thing we could discuss...but I wanted to stay as far away from that as possible.

"Uh...I guess I owe you an explanation for why I was MIA," Miranda said, scratching the back of her head.

So much for staying away.

"Yeah, I guess. What happened?"

"Well..." Miranda paused, putting her thoughts into words. "You know my family's not like yours, right?"

"I guessed as much," I admitted. "But then, isn't that the same with every family?"

"That's true, I guess. But, basically, my parents are a bit more...distant than yours are. They both work pretty hard, so I didn't really see a lot of them. Latchkey kid in the extreme."

"Um...didn't? As in past tense?"

"Yeah. It was like that, up until about two weeks ago."

"The time that we first met in person."

"Yeah. Well, that's pretty much what started this whole thing. When I got back home, I told my parents about you. Right thing to do, right? I didn't expect them to really care about it, just shrug it off and go back to whatever they were doing."

"But they didn't ignore it." I swallowed hard. I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going...

"Yeah. I think me mentioning that I'd kissed a boy must have shocked them out of their ruts, cause the next day they were _completely_ different people. All of a sudden, they care about me, what I think, how my life is...you get the idea. Hell, my Mom even said she was going to start cutting time out of her work to be with me."

"Sounds like a bad Disney film." I said, before taking another swig of Mountain Dew. My mouth felt dry for some reason.

"Oh you have no idea..." Miranda sighed, and shifted to rest her head against my chest. After a couple tense seconds where my brain refused to work, I shifted to make her more comfortable.

"I'm going to guess you didn't like this change."

"Of course not! Scared the fucking shit outta me. That first day, I thought that my parents had been replaced by some new kind of Flood Form. Then I thought it was just a phase, brought on by something they learned that scared them. But after they kept it up for three days, I couldn't take it any more."

"Three days..." Something clicked into place in my mind; three days after our first meeting was when Miranda had started coming over regularly. Now that I thought about it, she _had_ seemed amazingly happy to hang out with me. At the time, I figured it was the same reason that I was happy to see her; we were in...well, it wasn't _love_, but we sure as hell were closer than friends. But now...

"You started coming over here to escape your family." I said finally. Miranda nodded, the motion making her head nuzzle my chest.

"Yeah. Partially, at least. I did also look forward to seeing you." She giggled again and kissed my chest.

"But yeah, part of the reason I came over here so often was to get away from my parents. I mean, it was bad enough when they started being over-enthusiastic about me. But _then_ they decided we needed to have more "family time", to make up for everything that we'd lost while I was "growing up" or whatever. So Mom started setting up all these little trips to places that she thought I might like to go-"

"Sounds fun." I noted. "I wish my family did more stuff like that."

Miranda glared at me, but in a cute and joking way.

"Except they were all places that would have been fun to me when I was like, 10. I'm fucking 19, Colin. I've hit puberty. I have boobs. How would _you_ feel if you had to go to a Chuck. E. Cheese's for lunch with your family?"

I blinked, surprised both by the question and Miranda's sudden darker terminology.

"Urg...I'd probably lock myself in the bathroom. Or just walk around picking up all the tickets that little kids loose."

Miranda smiled darkly again. "Yeah, that's what I did. Got a couple free candy bars out of it."

"Wait, you actually went to a Chuck. E. Cheese?"

"The third day that my parents were acting weird. Just before I came to see you. Actually, that's pretty much _why_ I came to see you. I couldn't take another minute with them."

"So you basically used hanging out with me as an excuse to escape your family's trips." I said slowly. Miranda nodded again.

"So why did you stop coming over?"  
>Miranda's eyes took on the hard look I had seen earlier. I felt a tingle run up my spine, which only got worse when she wrapped one of her arms over my shoulder.<p>

"They gave me a taste of my own medicine." Miranda laughed softly. On instinct, I started stroking her hair, slowly. She didn't tell me to stop, so I continued.

"I think they just got tired of me sneaking off to to your house whenever they had something planned. So, at the start of this week, they started scheduling stuff that took all day. Movie binges. Shopping trips. Hell, we even hiked up Mount Rainier at one point. They filled up all of last week. I barley had time to call you that one time to cancel our meeting.

"And you just let them?" I couldn't help but say it. Miranda, thankfully, didn't seem offended.

"For the first couple days. I mean, there really wasn't much I could do in the first place, right?

"True."

"And _some_ of it was actually fun. Got did new clothes out of the shopping trip, and I now have a copy of every Halo book printed..."

"But..."

"But then it kept on going, so I finally just talked to them and came clean."

"How did that go?"

"Surprisingly well. We straightened a lot of things out. But..."

"Oh boy." The tingle returned to my spine. "There's always a 'but'"

"Well...once everything was smoothed out, they explained partially _why_ they'd been doing all this weird stuff. Really, it was all just to protect me."

"Doesn't surprise me."

"Me either. The thing is, though, well..."

"What?" The work came out as a hoarse whisper. My pulse rate jumped again. My vision tunneled to just Miranda's face. I felt light headed. This, whatever it was, was going to be bad.

"They don't like how fast this...relationship we have is moving. They just wanted me to slow down."

There it was; the real cause of all this crap that had been happening these last couple weeks.

"Little over-protective, wouldn't you say?" I muttered. Miranda simply sighed.

"Sure, but that's their right, right? I am their only daughter after all."

"Not going to argue with that. Even if its really, really cliche." I fell silent again, at a loss for words and slightly light-headed. From the deepest, darkest part of my mind, a question emerged.

"What do _you_ think about our relationship?" I asked.

Miranda looked at me, eye to eye. I'd never really noticed it until now, but her eyes were a kind of greenish-blue color. Very pretty.

"Do you want the truth?" She asked quietly.

I nodded. Miranda looked at me again, and I could have sworn I saw sadness in her eyes.

"I agree with them." There wasn't any hesitation in her voice. This wasn't a hasty decision, made in the last seconds. She'd honestly thought this out, long and hard.

A horrid swooping sensation filled my guts, like the feeling I got when I was in the Museum of Flight's dogfight simulator. It surged up into my chest like a living thing, grabbing onto my lungs and heart and sealing my throat shut. I couldn't speak, couldn't breath, could barely think. I felt like I was dying.

Unaware of my plight, Miranda continued on.

"I mean, I like you, a lot, but, well, we don't really know each other that well, we just met over Live and then started hanging out and stuff, so I-"

"I need to go." I managed to whisper out. Miranda stopped, confused.

"Huh?"

"I need to go. I'm feeling funny."

"Wait, Colin, listen-"

"I'm just going to get some air. I've spent to long on the Xbox." I stood up, shakily. Miranda moved out of the way to avoid being thrown off my lap.

"Colin, I-"

"I'll be back." I didn't give her time to finish, or say anything else. I walked out of my room, legs unsteady, head spinning and vision blurred. I some how managed to get down the stairs without killing myself, opened the back door of my house, and headed into my back yard.

"Yard" isn't really the most appropriate term for it. It's more of a small wood. I live in a northern section of Seattle that has large sections of protected wetland (caused by the convergence of several small rivers that feed into a single one that runs into Puget Sound through Carkeek Park, a couple miles north of my house, which also give it the unofficial title of "Forks", no relation to the lame vampire-infested town on the Olympic Peninsula), and so the back of my house is shrouded in greenery. Trees and grass encroached upon the house, and one of the streams that gave the area it's unofficial name ran a downhill a couple of yards from deeper in.

At that moment, I could have cared less. All I wanted to do was get out of the house and do what I always did whenever I felt horrible; run.

And I'd never felt more horrible in my life than at that point.

The cold air made me feel a little better. The sun had just gone down, but there was still enough light to see by. The wind brushed my face, making me shiver.

I took one last look at the house, felt the sudden swooping sensation from before, and simply started moving.

Behind me, I could hear Miranda shouting something from the window above me. I couldn't hear her; my breath was to loud. I ran harder, charging straight into the greenery behind my house.

I'm a fast runner; the best sprinter in school. In seconds, I was deep in the woods, charging blindly along, not looking where I was going. I didn't care if I got lost. I hoped I would. Darkness fell faster. Soon, I could barely see anything, but I kept running. The ground beneath me because wilder; in moments, I was jumping logs, stumps, rocks and holes. But still I ran.

My lungs burned, and my legs felt like they had napalm in them, but I didn't stop. I had to get away. If I stopped running, I would simply crumple under the weight of...I didn't know what. What was I running from? I didn't know. What Miranda had told me wasn't all _that_ bad, was it?

I truly didn't know.

So I kept running.

I started to feel lightheaded again. In the back of my mind, I wished I'd had more to eat than just Mountain Dew and some cheese crackers earlier. But I pushed on.

I saw movement in the corner of my eye. I slowed, but didn't stop. There wasn't anything. I kept running.

Movement again. This time, I did come to a stop. My chest heaved, lungs craving air. But even my ragged gasping didn't drown out the sound of movement. I leaned up against a tree and listened.

Silence, except for the wind in the trees and the chittering of a bird.

No, not a bird. This noise wasn't natural. It sounded metallic, yet organic at the same time.

In fear, I spun around. Nothing. The forest was silence. My heart hammered against my ribcage.

Then I heard the sound again, closer. In the bush right behind me.

In that moment, the last part of my sane mind was consumed by fear. I didn't think. I reacted.

I hurled myself away from the bush, running with the speed of fear. My head spun. As I ran, I saw thing out of the corner of my eye, things I knew weren't real; Halo things. Grunts, Jackals, a dead Marine. I rand still harder. More Marines, alive this time. Firing on the Covenant. Hunters, an Elite. A Spartan.

The forest vanished around me, vaporizing like steam on a hot plate. Fire replaced it, the ground beneath me becoming cracked, blackened glass. Above me, a Covenant cruiser, it's plasma projector firing. I ran, and ran, and ran-

And suddenly I was falling, tumbling down a sudden drop in the ground. The fall seemed to take forever and only mere seconds. I screamed, an incoherent howl of fear and pain and rage and other emotions.

Then I hit the ground. Cold mud slammed into me, knocking the breath out of me and saturating my clothes. I lay there, unable to move. The darkness around me seemed to shimmer.

"This place...will become your tomb." Miranda's voice whispered to me, echoing Cortana. "This is the way the world ends." Then blackness swallowed me.


End file.
